Data

The main data contains the following variables on all medal winners in all winter Olympics from 1924 to 2014:

  • Year: year of the winter Olympics
  • City: city the Olympics is held
  • Sport: the type of sport
  • Discipline: a grouping of disciplines
  • Event: the particular event / competition
  • Athlete: name of the athlete
  • Country: country origin of the athlete
  • Gender: gender of the athlete
  • Medal: type of medal won

For example, an event is a competition in a sport or discipline that gives rise to a ranking. Thus, skiing is a sport, while cross-country skiing, Alpine skiing, snowboarding, ski jumping and Nordic combined are disciplines. Alpine skiing is a discipline, while the super-G, giant slalom, slalom and combined are events.

In addition, information about the countries is available in a separate spreadsheet including the IOC Country Code, Population, and GDP per capita.

Visualizations

1. Medal Counts over Time

Because some countries that competed under different designations in the past (e.g. Germany and Russia), I chose to combine Russia with URS, Germany with EUA, FRG and GDR, YUG with Bosnia (for purposes of BIH hosting) and Czech Republic with TCH.

Summary of Olympics Games Medaled In

Many of the following analyses will use data from the top 10 medal-winning countries:

## # A tibble: 10 x 7
##    Country  Gold Silver Bronze num_olymp total_medals  rank
##    <fct>   <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>     <int>        <dbl> <int>
##  1 RUS     344    187      172        15          703     1
##  2 USA     167    319      167        22          653     2
##  3 GER     226    208      203        20          637     3
##  4 CAN     315    203      107        22          625     4
##  5 NOR     159    171      127        22          457     5
##  6 FIN      66.0  147      221        22          434     6
##  7 SWE     127    129      177        22          433     7
##  8 SUI      76.0   77.0    132        21          285     8
##  9 AUT      79.0   98.0    103        22          280     9
## 10 CZE      30.0   92.0    111        16          233    10
Olympic Medals Over Time

To visualize how many medals the top 10 medal-winning countries won over the 1920-2014 Winter Olympics, I created two wrapped plots. Both use the colors gold, silver and bronze to display how many of each medal type was won over time. I would recommend the second of these plots to my editor, as I believe the colors and trends are clearer in an area plot than in a scatter plot. Something that immediately jumps out is that while Canada and USA seem to have won similarly large amounts of medals over time, the US has won many more silver and gold, while Canada seems to focus on gold.

Total Medal Visualizations

To visualize the total amount of medals won by the top 10 medal-winning countries, I produced a lollipop chart for a quick glance, then a bar chart that includes countries that have won at least 100 medals over time with the same gold, silver and bronze coloring to add more information and to make the stacks immediately obvious to the reader. It turns out there are only 13 countries that have won at least 100 medals over time, so the second chart isn’t much longer than the first. I propose that the editor uses the more colorful chart since it conveys more information and is likely more intriguing to the reader.

2. Medal Counts adjusted by Population, GDP

I created three separate rankings of success per country by GDP per capita, population, and total number of medals won. I then chose to visualize this data in a few different ways. First, I visualized the percentage of medals won divided by the population of each country. Countries are ordered by GDP/Capita ranking, thus, countries with high GDP/Capita and a low percentage of medals/population are highlighted in yellow. LUX, for instance, has the highest GDP/Capita out of all the countries yet a very low percentage of medals/population. SUI and NOR’s success makes sense, given they have high GDP/Capita and high percentage of medals/population. The USA, however, could do better!

The next viz shows the countries lined up by population size and compares how many medals they’ve won in total. Countries with the fewest medals are “shamed” by being highlighted in yellow. China and Japan are both countries with particularly large populations that don’t tend to win as many medals as other countries with large populations.

I then adjusted the visualizations to be bubble charts that may be slightly more aesthetically pleasing. I calculated GDP as GDP/Capita multiplied by the population to make the axes comparable. The following viz points out China, specifically, as a country with both a lot of people and a lot of money, but we can see from the size of its bubble that China is not a very big medal producer. I don’t love shaming individual countries, so I’d suggest the editor uses the final visualization in publication.

Lastly, I visualized the percentage of medals won by the country’s population, again, and showed how many total medals countries won overall via the size of each bubble. From this viz, it’s clear that Norway and Finland do well for themselves given the large amount of medals they’ve won despite their smaller populations.

3. Host Country Advantage

I calculated whether the countries won more medals when they hosted Winter Olympics as opposed to when they were visiting participants. To do so, I downloaded necessary country host information from Wikipedia.

I began visualizing the data with a wrapped bar chart for each country that has ever hosted in the Olympics. I chose stark colors (grey and blue) so the reader can easily see a country’s total number of medals won when they were hosts versus when they were visiting participants. It’s clear from the visualization that most countries do exceedingly better, if not, at least as good as they’ve ever done, when they host.

A downside of the next plot I created is that it’s slightly harder to compare the exact amount of medals won each year, but I find it particularly aesthetically pleasing. This plot includes only countries that have hosted an Olympics and shows how many medals each country won at each winter Olympics. Tiles outlined in black indicate that the country hosted that year.

4. Country success by sport / discipline / event

First, I wanted to compare USA and Canadian Olympic performance especially because of their hockey rivalry. I adjusted the dataset to account for the fact that hockey is a large team sport and calculated the total number of medals as just one per win rather than per player. I visualized the number of medals won per sport (discipline) between the countries using a stacked bar chart. USA’s advantage over Canada is clear. To improve this plot, I’d add an interactive overlay to indicate the precise amount of medals per sport layer.

To best visualize the top 10 medal-winning countries, I’d suggest using the visualization below. It provides the reader with even more information but in a (hopefully) digestible way – the reader can tell how many of each medal type (gold, silver, bronze) each country won overall in each discipline. The top ten countries happen to be best at Skiing and Skating sports as indicated by the darker blues.

5. Most successful athletes

Below is a visual display of the most successful winter Olympic athletes of all time. Norway tends to produce the top medal-winning winter athletes, which is not surprising given Norway’s clear success in prior plots.

I then split the athletes by gender. From the plots, we can see that women dominate in Cross Country Skiing while men dominate in the Biathlon. The top medal-winning men have won a few more medals than the top women.

Interactivity

6. Medals per Population

For my first interactive plot, I chose to add additional information to my bubble chart that represented the number of medals per person/population of each country. Prior to adding interactivity, the scale for total medals won was unclear. The below plot allows the user to hover over each bubble and get a clearer picture of how many overall medals the country won on a scale .

7. Host Country Advantage

My second interactive plot (created with HighCharter) I modeled off of my host country heat map visualization. The user can hover over each heat map tile to see whether the country hosted the Olympics that particular year and how many medals the country won.

8. Data Table

I chose to create a data table that provides the reader with information about each contending country in the Winter Olympics, including the country’s population, how many winter games the country has competed and medaled in, and the number of Gold, Silver and Bronze medals won. The small colored bars are supposed to serve as a visual representation of the proportion of medals that were Gold, Silver and Bronze.